Award aims to honour imaginative fiction that champions ‘hope and freedom, alternatives to conflict and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world’ Read more
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Abdurraqib’s book is a meditation on Black performance in the modern age, moving from Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time show to Aretha Franklin’s funeral. It is inspired by Josephine Baker’s words: “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.” It topped a six-strong shortlist featuring titles including Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth and Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death, to win the prize, which celebrates “literature that is fearless in both ambition and execution”, in honour of the late writer Gordon Burn. Read more
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The poet, educator, and activist was selected for the $250,000 cash award “in recognition of her ongoing achievements in inspiring change through the power of the word.” Read more
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The Tanzanian writer who moved to Britain as a refugee in the 1960s was honored for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism.” Read more
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Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak this week appointed author and University of Nevada, Reno professor Gailmarie Pahmeier as Nevada Poet Laureate. She will serve a two-year term from September 2021 through August 2023. Read more
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Twenty years before Margaret Atwood won the inaugural Arthur C Clarke award for her seminal novel The Handmaid’s Tale, she published a poem entitled The animals in that country. Now Laura Jean McKay, who borrowed the title of Atwood’s poem for her debut novel, has gone on to win the prestigious prize, with judges praising her story of a pandemic that enables humans to understand the language of animals for “reposition[ing] the boundaries of science fiction once again”. Read more
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“The Inheritance” was a play about the legacy of the AIDS epidemic (in two parts, it ran a total of six hours). It premiered in London in 2018, where The Telegraph called it “perhaps the most important American play of the century so far.” Read more
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Toi Derricotte, the revered, award-winning poet and professor emerita of English at the University of Pittsburgh. has known for about a month that she was the recipient of a major prize from the Academy of American Poetry, but she had to keep it a secret. This week, Ms. Derricotte was able to share her secret when it was officially announced that she is the recipient of its 2021 Wallace Stevens Award. Read more
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Patricia Smith has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, a $100,000 honor presented by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. Previous winners include W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan and the current poet laureate, Joy Harjo. Smith is known for such collections as “Blood Dazzler” and “Incendiary Art,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018. Read more
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Clarke’s follow-up to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was praised by judges as ‘a truly original, unexpected flight of fancy’ Read more
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